All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [43]
The Khmer culture has traditionally been patriarchal, with women expected to obey their fathers, husbands, and elders without question. “Society always treated young boys and men as kings,” Sochua explained. Women had few rights to begin with. But after years of war, the social constraints that moderated the exploitation of girls and women fell apart. Although prostitution had always been present, the industry grew explosively after Pol Pot’s regime. Cambodian men flocked to the brothels, and men were paying for sex with younger and younger prostituted women, even children, believing that sex with young children increased their virility. Some even believed that raping a young virgin would cure AIDS and other diseases, a myth that helped create a sickening market for girls ten and younger. “Genocide took the soul of my country,” Sochua said. “Men no longer have limits, and the rule of law has broken down.” According to numerous human rights reports, the Cambodian police were more likely to be demanding bribes and abusing prostituted people than enforcing the law.
This morning, Mu Sochua guided us into Svay Pak, the most lawless and depraved brothel district in Cambodia; she later told me that she and her associate had grimly and purposefully conspired to take me, “a bright light, to the darkest place.” About six miles outside of the capital, we entered an affluent-looking neighborhood of smoothly stuccoed villas painted in pastel colors and perched on stilts. I was about to comment on them, making up something positive in my mind about this domestic expression of relative economic prosperity, when Mu Sochua, in a voice thick with disgust, told us that these houses belonged to pimps and traffickers. The money that built them came from sexual pain and humiliation.
The nice little houses soon gave way to a congested warren of muddy alleys and storefront brothels hidden behind sliding metal grates. I will never forget peering into a gap between houses that afforded a harrowing glimpse of very young children and women in a courtyard. There was a small outdoor fire smoking. They were hanging wash on a line. We heard tinny music playing from a cheap boom box.
“That is Vietnamese music,” Sochua told me. “They have been smuggled here from Vietnam for sex.”
I thought: Slaves? This is what slaves look like? They aren’t shackled? They light fires? They do wash? They listen to music from their homeland? This was but the beginning of a series of revelations that would bend my mind and break my heart.
The next bizarre thing for me to grasp was that I could visit slaves, sit intimately with them, hearing details of their realities through open dialogue and sharing, yet when I left they would still be slaves. As public health advocates, we could be tolerated by pimps and madams, who, while not exactly friendly, would accept our presence and medical assistance. The women, girls, and boys had been vilely raped and abused the night before I arrived, and after I left, it would be mere hours before the humiliation and emotional torture began again.
Next was that the expression of stupendous grief and pain from captive people would not move their captors to set them free. The outpouring of anguish I witnessed meant nothing to those who caused and (so it seemed to me) could end it.
The distress was stunning, and I was so emotionally flooded that I shut down a few times. What I had chosen to face simply exceeded my capacity to process, and eventually I would have to develop an effective and safe method for coping in